A Promise of Redemption

By PAUL WATKINS

Published: August 6, 1995

All men live in the shadow of their fathers -- the more distant the father, the deeper the shadow. Barack Obama describes his confrontation with this shadow in his provocative autobiography, "Dreams From My Father," and he also persuasively describes the phenomenon of belonging to two different worlds, and thus belonging to neither.

Now in his mid-30's, Mr. Obama is the son of a white American mother and a black Kenyan father who met and married as students at the University of Hawaii. His father returned to Kenya when Mr. Obama was still young. Mr. Obama charts his journey through adolescence into manhood with the familiar type of anecdotes, but adds to them a bewildering combination of races, relatives and homelands, from Hawaii to Indonesia to Africa to Chicago.

Mr. Obama was born into a cultural milieu that on the surface made for perfect social and racial diversity, but living such a life proved extraordinarily difficult. To balance the blessing of diversity and the pain of never feeling completely a part of one people or one place, the young Mr. Obama falls back on colorful stories from the world of his imagination. He boldly tells his classmates at the prestigious Punahou Academy in Hawaii, where he is on scholarship, that his father's tribe in Africa "is full of warriors." The name Obama, he tells them, "means 'Burning Spear.' The men in our tribe all want to be chief, so my father has to settle these feuds" before the boy can go visit him.

After college in Los Angeles and New York City, he sets out to become a community organizer. Mr. Obama admits he's unsure exactly what the phrase means, but is attracted by the ideal of people united in community and purpose: "A promise of redemption." He begins an apprenticeship at the Altgeld Gardens public housing project in Chicago, but he quickly becomes the pawn of professional organizers, intent on profiteering from money gouged out of the city budget. Although Mr. Obama is no more black than he is white, his quest for acceptance is aimed at the African-Americans with whom he shares his organizational duties, and his story bogs down in discussions of racial exploitation without really shedding any new light on the subject.

His father's sudden death after the two have re-established contact prevents Mr. Obama from confronting anything but the man's legacy. He travels to Kenya, where he and his newly found siblings visit their father's Luo tribal lands.

Mr. Obama anticipates this homecoming optimistically, equating it with scenes in Alex Haley's popular book "Roots." But on his arrival the myth of Africa and the folkloric tales of his father are quickly replaced by a more sober reality. The scenes describing Mr. Obama's bewilderment at seeing a land he has known only through stories, and at learning of his father's drinking habits, his arrogance and his decline from successful academic to object of pity, are finely written. Mr. Obama's final judgment on his father, however, had come much earlier. "I realized how even in his absence his strong image had given me some bulwark with which to grow up, an image to live up to or disappoint." What his African sojourn teaches Mr. Obama is that he cannot wait for such a judgment to be passed upon himself, because the only man who can deliver it is dead.

Back in the United States, Mr. Obama attends Harvard Law School and becomes the first black editor of the Law Review. (A Chicago friend says, "You got options. . . . When somebody's got a choice between Harvard and Roseland, it's only so long somebody's gonna keep choosing Roseland.") The irony is that he returns to a white man's institution to receive this definition of his race. There has been no emotional investigation into his other half, his "white side" -- although he was lovingly brought up by his mother and her parents -- and this might have provided further answers to the questions he raises about himself and where he belongs.

Whether Mr. Obama has at last made peace with himself remains unclear, but he has at least stepped out of the paternal shadow. He does this, as all sons must, by achieving and surpassing the lofty goals set for him by the father: "You are an Obama. You should be the best."

At a young age and without much experience as a writer, Barack Obama has bravely tackled the complexities of his remarkable upbringing. But what would he have us learn? That people of mixed backgrounds must choose only one culture in which to make a spiritual home? That it is not possible to be both black and white, Old World and New? If this is indeed true, as Mr. Obama tells it, then the idea of America taking pride in itself as a nation derived of many different races seems strangely mocked. America will always be part of the Old World and part of the New, part dream and part reality -- that truth is integral to the greatness and the possibility from which Mr. Obama has so richly profited.

Paul Watkins is the author of a memoir, "Stand Before Your God," and five novels.